I haven't bought an iPad nor any tablet, however if I was in the market for one (I still feel like I will buy one soon) then my first choice is an iPad 2. Because I believe these other manufacturers not only need to make their tablets better then the iPad 2 but cheaper as well for it to stand a chance. Matching apples 499 price in my humble opinion is not enough. Consumers understand that no tablet to date can replace a laptop completely, not the iPad or any other tablet. So in that regard specs don't sell tablets. And when these manufacturers try to compete with apple on the user experience level they're shooting themselves in the foot. Because even if their tablets user experience is better then apples, they have an uphill battle trying to undo the mindset of consumers that apples ecosystem is not the best. Again in my very inexperienced opinion that's almost impossible to do at this stage. People don't want tablets, they want ipads. And it's getting more and more noticable as time goes on.

You are an astute and savvy shopper, which puts you well ahead of the average consumer. Most tend to just look at price, or bad information. Recently, a friend of mine chose an Android phone over an iPhone, because she was under the impression that she would need a Mac in order to use her iPhone, and since she used Windows at work, she needed Windows at home and bla bla bla... I think her impression is fairly common among non-Apple users. Some memes you just gotta let slide.

Actually, I'm far more interested in Apple as a customer than as a shareholder, so I really do hope these products do better than they have done so far.

Apple's never been a company to rest on their laurels, but a little competition wouldn't hurt.

At the rate Apple's going, the one thing that would hurt Apple is competition. As has been said previously on other threads, Apple are pushing themselves just fine. They have the cash and resources to take the slow, considered and meticulous approach to product development, and they're still more than a year ahead in the tablet game. Serious competition from other makers would only cut into Apple's revenue/profits.

Keep in mind that Apple is not Microsoft. Microsoft basically "owns" the desktop OS, and is happy to have hundreds of millions of cranky customers, whereas Apple would rather have tens of millions of happy customers.*

What a laugh. When the second item in your list of advantages over the iPad requires a disclaimer like that, well good luck being an "iPad-killer" (from what I understand the Flash for Xoom is at present a beta version). Meanwhile, pretty much all video on the web is getting converted to html5 so who really cares?

Because belittling your potential customer base is a great way to win them over. Never mind that the guy seems to already own an iPad.

The reason the "same old arguments" keep coming up is because people have been asking for them for years, and Apple hasn't implemented them. Ergo, Android found a niche.

If Apple had listened, they might have totally eaten Android's lunch rather than just taking their drink and fruit cup.

Apple has to find a balance between making a product customers are happy with, and sticking with their "minimalist" approach to industrial design. It's not that Apple totally ignores customer interests/desires/wishes, it's just that pleasing every customer, or fulfilling every wish presents serious engineering problems. Add to that the fact that a lot of customers simply don't know what they want. SD card slot? CF slot? USB? HDMI? Firewire? SCSI? Half of the people I talk to about this stuff don't even know what a lot of these things are for. They just know they're "important", and that "I need it!" I see people walking around with digital cameras who don't even know what kind of memory card their camera uses! Are these the people Apple should be "listening" to?

Fine. Don't bother ranting around here, that's all. Go find your perfect Android device and cuddle with it. Sell your iDevice on eBay and get whatever works better for you - so you can view Flash, etc. We're bent out of shape reading your pointless rants.

Another great shortfall of the Apple Evangelist community-- ignore deficiencies and blow off observations as 'rants' You folks are a bunch of touchy hotheads from what I've seen so far. I really do like my iPad quite a bit, I just fail to understand why so many people are blindly obedient to the (sometimes ridiculous) guidelines set forth by Apple.

Do you really believe that Apple deserves no criticism? I guess we should all smile and await the iNextDev. Maybe it will get a decent notification system... just maybe. But if it doesn't, it's probably just cause Steve knows best. Right?

Apple has to find a balance between making a product customers are happy with, and sticking with their "minimalist" approach to industrial design. It's not that Apple totally ignores customer interests/desires/wishes, it's just that pleasing every customer, or fulfilling every wish presents serious engineering problems. Add to that the fact that a lot of customers simply don't know what they want. SD card slot? CF slot? USB? HDMI? Firewire? SCSI? Half of the people I talk to about this stuff don't even know what a lot of these things are for. They just know they're "important", and that "I need it!" I see people walking around with digital cameras who don't even know what kind of memory card their camera uses! Are these the people Apple should be "listening" to?

I understand where you're going with this and I do agree with you in general. However, for instance.. USB is a fairly standard thing. Charge by USB would not be confusing. Nor hosting storage via same port. Basically every mobile device that isn't made by Apple supports expandable storage via some type of SD card. Often it is hidden behind a panel. Ok so yeah this extra port might disrupt the sleek casing but for the people who don't understand its function I am not sure how it would confuse them. There is only one reason Apple omits storage expansion-- to shift value to their models w/ more built in flash. I ended up w/ a 64gb iPad 2 (which was painful to purchase) because I needed as much space as possible. Kind of feels like Apple has bent me over the table because if it were a Xoom (for example) I could just buy some 16gb microSDs for much less. All part of my love/hate relationship with the big A.

I understand where you're going with this and I do agree with you in general. However, for instance.. USB is a fairly standard thing. Charge by USB would not be confusing...

Ok, this whole port ting...I would much rather have a single port that can have multiple applications (charging, HDMI, SD Card, etc) than have multiple ports sticking out the bottom of my device. Given that I do not use many of those types of ports I do not miss them, but if I do need them I can get a nice little plugin unit that will handle it for me.

Heck, look at Thunderbolt, single port that will have a large range of usage. The costs of adding multiple hardware ports onto a device can be quite high, why not work to reduce the number of ports by using a more universal port?

Just because a device has a ton of physical ports does not make it any better.

I understand where you're going with this and I do agree with you in general. However, for instance.. USB is a fairly standard thing. Charge by USB would not be confusing. Nor hosting storage via same port. Basically every mobile device that isn't made by Apple supports expandable storage via some type of SD card. Often it is hidden behind a panel. Ok so yeah this extra port might disrupt the sleek casing but for the people who don't understand its function I am not sure how it would confuse them. There is only one reason Apple omits storage expansion-- to shift value to their models w/ more built in flash. I ended up w/ a 64gb iPad 2 (which was painful to purchase) because I needed as much space as possible. Kind of feels like Apple has bent me over the table because if it were a Xoom (for example) I could just buy some 16gb microSDs for much less. All part of my love/hate relationship with the big A.

Now your talking sense. You've presented an interesting perspective and I'm beginning to understand your own position better.

Another great shortfall of the Apple Evangelist community-- ignore deficiencies and blow off observations as 'rants' You folks are a bunch of touchy hotheads from what I've seen so far. I really do like my iPad quite a bit, I just fail to understand why so many people are blindly obedient to the (sometimes ridiculous) guidelines set forth by Apple.

Do you really believe that Apple deserves no criticism? I guess we should all smile and await the iNextDev. Maybe it will get a decent notification system... just maybe. But if it doesn't, it's probably just cause Steve knows best. Right?

Touche.

Sorry, I changed my mind about what you stated earlier and deleted the post to which you're responding, but not soon enough, I see.

The fact that complaints are OLD complaints just reinforces that Apple doesn't listen to their customers PERIOD. Whats that? you want something that is obviously missing? NO no please stop thinking and let us tell you how to use our gimped product.

Please. The issues that you bring up -- adapters to plug in camera/SD card or to an external display, "you get no ports, no expansion," multitasking previews, widgets, usb host mode, openness, no option to view Flash, read external media, or manage content -- have been discussed ad nauseum in these boards, with numerous sensible reasons offered up by some pretty knowledgable folks for why these constraints exist. You should do a bit of research before dredging up tired, old stuff.

More important, the laziness of your thinking is evident when you make statements such as "...it is Apple's advantage to hinder expandability where it could be implemented so easily..." or imply that Apple does not listen to its users. Multitasking, cameras, AirPlay, AirPrint, HDMI connector, expanded capabilities for iWork, iMovie, GarageBand, Photo Booth, changing the toggle button back to allowing screen lock, to name just a few, are examples of where Apple has listened to its customers. (And, 'Apple's advantage to hinder....'? How exactly?)

If you don't like Apple's pace and approach in doing this (and many of us believe that Apple does it substantially better than Google does), by all means jump ship and switch. There, after all, dozens of Android tablet choices, so there's no point in whining about Apple. It is what it is.

I understand where you're going with this and I do agree with you in general. However, for instance.. USB is a fairly standard thing. Charge by USB would not be confusing. Nor hosting storage via same port. Basically every mobile device that isn't made by Apple supports expandable storage via some type of SD card. Often it is hidden behind a panel. Ok so yeah this extra port might disrupt the sleek casing but for the people who don't understand its function I am not sure how it would confuse them. There is only one reason Apple omits storage expansion-- to shift value to their models w/ more built in flash. I ended up w/ a 64gb iPad 2 (which was painful to purchase) because I needed as much space as possible. Kind of feels like Apple has bent me over the table because if it were a Xoom (for example) I could just buy some 16gb microSDs for much less. All part of my love/hate relationship with the big A.

Yowza! I would never buy a product that would make me feel like I was bent over a table! But yeah. Sometimes you gotta make compromises. Also, and I grant that this is more of an issue of work/organizational styles, but carrying around a bunch of microSD cards would be a nuisance to me. 16GB is a lot of of storage space--that's nearly 1,000 photos at my camera's resolution, or several gazillion text files. If I had enough data (images, video, text, PDFs, etc.) to fill 64GB of storage, well, I'm addle-brained enough that I wouldn't want that data spread out over several media cards. I'd be constantly trying to remember which filesare on which cards (remember, this is 1,000 photos and several gazillion other file types per card!). Also, microSD cards are tiny, hence the "micro" on the front. Too easy to misplace or lose (again, a consequence of the weirdness of my brain, I suppose).
In general, I like to keep all my stuff in one central location*, so that I can easily locate and access what I need when I need it.

* With redundancy of course--all my data is mirrored in two additional locations.

Our brains each work a little bit differently. Each of us should buy the gadgets/tools that are most compatible with our style of working.

The other engineering issue associated with additional slots/ports is that each port requires a bus and a controller chip, each of which tax the battery more. The iPad was never designed or intended to be a "mothership". Including a USB port would tempt users to plug in their phones, their iPods, etc. to the iPad, which would kill the "10-hour battery" feature pretty quickly. Same issue with a card slot. Reading/writing back and forth between tablet and card will also place additional burdens on the battery.

Incidentally, you can now buy 32GB microSD cards. Think about it. 2,000 photos, or almost 7 standard DVDs worth of data on something that's about the size of my pinky fingernail. Pretty freakin' incredible.

I generally stay abreast of trends and developments in technology, but I'm still amazed by it all. It's pretty magical really.

ASUS looks to have taken note of previous competitors overly optimistic sales projections. There's reports at Engadget this morning that, contrary to earlier rumors of component shortages, they really did run out or Transformers due to "overwhelming demand".

Of course it's not the same level of overwhelming demand that kept Apple's iPad2 sales well under early projections. ASUS only estimated and planned for 100K units per month. They're now reported ramping up for 200K month beginning next month. And that's exactly the way it should be done. Better to miss out on a few sales than be left with thousands of unsold models languishing in a warehouse somewhere. Following Apple's lead in selling everything you can build can't be a bad thing.

ASUS looks to have taken note of previous competitors overly optimistic sales projections. There's reports at Engadget this morning that, contrary to earlier rumors of component shortages, they really did run out or Transformers due to "overwhelming demand".

Of course it's not the same level of overwhelming demand that kept Apple's iPad2 sales well under early projections. ASUS only estimated and planned for 100K units per month. They're now reported ramping up for 200K month beginning next month. And that's exactly the way it should be done. Better to miss out on a few sales than be left with thousands of unsold models languishing in a warehouse somewhere. Following Apple's lead in selling everything you can build can't be a bad thing.

Asus was smart to be conservative.

BTW no hard feelings? Haven't seen you around for a while. I might have been a bit harsh in some of my responses to you. Apologies.